In Israel, doctors write their prognosis of the patient's health in Hebrew where medical terms are written either in Hebrew, in English—using English alphabet, or English terms spelled with Hebrew alphabet (Hebraization of the English (Latin) terms). Furthermore, hebraization of an English (Latin) term may result plurality of Hebrew letter combinations. This causes problems in conducting computerized searches in documents that contain similar medical terms.
There is no comprehensive Hebrew medical dictionary, ontology or lexicon that either contains or translates multiple hebraization combinations of an English (Latin) term into English (Latin). Standard Hebrew dictionaries do not contain the Hebraized word and thus it is considered to be meaningless Hebrew word.
An example will further clarify the problem. The term “Cervical”, after hebraization may be written in multiple ways such as “”, “” “”, “”, “”. (The different letters are underscored). It is instantly noted that each word is differently spelled, although all have the same meaning. The Hebrew term for “cervical” is “”
Search engines and dictionaries used today assume that each word has one and only one correct spelling.
Thus, a search for a medical term in the medical “mixed language documents” must yield all the various shapes of that medical term. Currently there are no systems that allow for a document search in a mixed language environment where multiple spellings of the same word are acceptable.